1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of communications monitoring, and more particularly to a system and method of active monitoring of video devices in video calls.
2. Description of the Related Art
Over the past several years, video conferencing has gained acceptance as a way for businesses to conduct meetings. Compared with audio telephone conferences, video conferencing allows a more personal interaction between participants and supports visual presentation of information, such as by sharing presentations and documents. The quality of communication by video conferencing has steadily improved in recent years with the availability of greater communication bandwidth and information processing capability. This improved quality has encouraged businesses to invest in video communication devices and networks to support greater numbers of video conferences, both within the business and with customers outside of the business. One advantage for a business in investing in video conferencing capability is a reduction in travel costs with greater numbers of meetings occurring via video conferencing instead of in person. However, as the number of video calls and the complexity of video networks for a business increase, difficulties in use, scheduling and interoperability of video devices often arise. One key for a business to obtain the most possible return on an investment in video devices and a video network is an efficient video network administration staff able to monitor and correct difficulties that arise with video devices and video network so that users will feel comfortable relying on the video devices and video network for important communications.
Although the quality of video calls has improved with more reliable hardware and software components and with less expensive communication bandwidth, difficulties do arise during video conferences, such as video jitter, audio jitter, video latency and other synchronization or coding problems. Typically video network administrators man a telephone support center so that video conference participants that run into difficulties may call to seek help. Passive support centers that react to video conference participant complaints generally provides a slow response that tends to delay the progress of the video call and diminish the experience of participants. Further, video network administrators often face substantial challenges once a problem is brought to their attention. For instance, the administrators typically have to identify the video devices engaged in the video call in order to isolate the source of the difficulty and develop a solution. In complex video conferences that involve a number of video devices from a variety of manufacturers or internet based video devices such as modules running on servers that perform video functions, a network administrator may have to interact with a variety of individual device interfaces to solve a difficulty.
As another alternative, video network administration support sometimes participates in video conferences as an invisible participant and actively monitors their own connection to gauge the quality of service of the other participants are experiencing. Although some software solutions allow monitoring of an individual's own device in a video call for quality of service, that individual device's connection does not necessarily provide an indication of the quality of the entire video call as a whole. Thus, although video network administrators may spend substantial amounts of time actively monitoring video calls, problems with the video calls may still not be detected until another participant calls the support center. Further, active monitoring by video network administrators detracts from the privacy expected by participants to a video call and encourages individuals to view video conferencing as a less desired way to communicate where other alternatives exist for meeting, such as travel and a personal meeting.